Somewhere in early February 2017, a friend told me about an aircraft design competition held by the AIAA. While I have some interest to join that competition, I figured that with all the current workload that I have in Master Specialise, that competition would be too much to handle, especially without a decent team. So I decided not to bother too much about it and just shared it to a closed facebook group of my current Master Specialise’s classmate just for the sake of sharing it. However, it turned out that some people were interested and came to me to talk about it and somehow I ended up in a group of 6 person who are foolish enough to sacrifice their free/sleeping/gaming/dating time to do this competition and we decided to participate for the design of business jet family.

So, before I continue with the story, I am going to introduce these six fearless man/woman. Of course, to protect these team members from public exposure and facebook stalking, I am going to hide their real identity and assign a special code name to them.

The Yellow Queen
The only female in the team and also the team’s manager. Talented in drawing Kiwi bird and artistic toilets, she is responsible for the structure of the aircraft and managing team’s sleeping schedule.

The Big Daddy
The rum smuggler in the team who loves to yodel in his free time. Experienced with atoms and making pasta, he is going to take care of the aircraft’s propulsion system.

The Lover Boy
The youngest on the team who is currently madly in love. With his exceptional skills in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere, he is going to do all the CAD works for the team and bake us some cake.

The Wrong Guy
A (suspected) undercover intelligent agent with multiple identities. He is joining the competition for leisure and will be handling the aircraft’s aerodynamics.

The GIFer
A man with a lot to GIFe (pun intended) and and incredibly awesome mustache that ended up become our team name and logo. He is tasked to handle the aircraft systems, to calculate cost, and to provide the team with the appropriate GIF for each situation.

Me
A man who loves to stay on a team, do nothing, and take credit for the success. Armed with countless love rejections and his hate for vegetables, he is in charge of the aircraft’s stability and team’s diary.

So, last Thursday, 16 February 2017, we decided to gather up for the very first time to determine the one and most important thing for this competition: the name of the aircrafts. Yes, aircrafts, because we have to design two family aircrafts. We particularly think that the name is crucial to the success of this project as it will dictates our motivation to do this work. After a couple of hours of useless non-sense brainstorming, we ended up naming our aircraft StratoKiwi and StratoDodo, all thanks to our team leader’s compulsive obsession to Kiwi birds and other non-flying plumpy birds. Please keep in mind that in real life, Kiwi is not in anyway related to Dodo. Kiwi came from the ratite family, together with ostriches and cassowaries. Dodo on the other hand, come from the noble family of pigeons. We also came up with our team name: The Flapping Moustache, which is inspired by the two magnificent moustaches that two of our team members have.

After the name is decided, we stayed for a while to do the initial doodling for our aircraft. All possible configurations were explored and a lot of scribbles are made to evaluate feasibility, ranging from the moustache-like canard configuration, moustache-like up-curling wing planform, and the moustache-like V-Tail configuration. Unfortunately in the end we couldn’t agree to one specific configuration before we were hungry, so we decided to just go home and continue later. To end this first diary post, here are some of our scribbles for your viewing purposes. Please keep in mind that this is not a random kindergarten’s drawing.